How does your disposable plastic water bottle look, this morning?
Most of us, I imagine, spend very little time thinking about our garbage, other than to sort the glass, paper, aluminum, and plastics into separate trash receptacles, perhaps. If we try and recycle.
I read where, back in 2013, the average American generated about 4 1/2 pounds of trash per day, and recycled about 1 1/2 pounds of that waste. So roughly a third of our garbage was recycled, and about two-thirds landed in various landfills. Or so they say. (These numbers are from the federal government.)
Speaking for my own little family, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of recycling. Or at least, we thought we were recycling. Actually, we didn’t give it much thought. Like, where exactly has the glass been going, when we sorted it into a separate bin? Where does the cardboard and paper go, exactly? The aluminum?
Maybe it’s all been going into landfills, after all?
I attended a meeting recently at the Archuleta County Administration Office, where the Board of County Commissioners heard a report from our Solid Waste Department. This department oversees our County landfill operation, located several miles south of town on Trujillo Road, as well as the transfer stations. The staff was estimating that, at the rate the community currently generates solid waste — and at the rate we currently recycle some of that waste — the County landfill will last maybe another 15 years before it runs out of capacity.
That is, until we fill our landfill to the brim.
The numbers from the federal government suggest, however, that if the community were to stop recycling, we would generate 50 percent more solid waste for our landfill. That would seemingly mean, the landfill would have only 10 years of life left.
Then what? We’re not really sure.
Something else I learned from the BOCC discussion. Our community has been “recycling” glass for many years now, but recently, the Solid Waste Department has been dumping the glass into the landfill, because they are unable to sell the glass to anyone, and have been unable to figure out a use for recycled glass, locally.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The prices paid for cardboard, paper, plastic, and other “recyclable” items has fallen dramatically over the past few years. Here’s a chart that illustrates one of the problems:
When cities all across America launched recycling programs in the 1980s and 1990s, the theory was that the revenue from the recovered materials would offset the costs of collecting and separating the waste — thus keeping it out of municipal and private landfills, and reducing the need for harvesting virgin materials. For environmental advocates, recycling formed the third segment of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” agenda.
Along the way, China became a major player in America’s recycling game. The export of Chinese manufactured goods took off in a dramatic way, starting in the early 1990s, and as shipping containers full of Chinese products arrived in the US, they were filled with recycled American packaging materials for the trip back to China. Our plastic, paper, cardboard, and other recyclables became raw materials for a booming Chinese economy.
From an article in the Huffington Post:
It had been a win-win situation. On the one hand, China needed a steady supply of recyclable waste to feed its flourishing manufacturing sector. And on the other, countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Japan lacked the recycling facilities and manpower that China had ― and they desperately needed a destination for their growing quantity of garbage.
About a year ago, however, China abruptly announced its intention to close its borders to this trash influx. The country notified the World Trade Organization that it would be banning the import of 24 categories of solid waste, including several kinds of scrap plastic and mixed paper. It also demanded that other waste materials, like cardboard and scrap metal, have only 0.5 percent contamination from food and other sources ― a standard that American recyclers have said is “impossible” to meet…
Prior to its new policy, China had been processing at least half of the world’s exports of waste plastic, paper and metals. Between 1992 and 2016, China accepted more than 110 million tons of plastic scrap from countries around the globe, or about 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste…
The new Chinese restrictions were enforced as of January 1, and the global impact was staggering. According to Arnaud Brunet, head of the Bureau of International Recycling, “It was a huge shock — a tsunami for the industry. When the biggest market for recyclables shuts the door to imports, you can expect the global industry will be under stress.”
In 2016, New York City spent $18 more per ton to collect and process recyclables than to dispose of its regular trash. Improper recycling added to the cost. Just one pizza box in a cardboard recycling pile can ruin the whole batch, since oils in it can’t be separated from the paper fiber.
Recycling electronics can be dangerous, exposing workers to serious health risks from heavy metals.
From an article in Bloomberg:
And there are natural limits. Paper can be recycled only five to seven times before the cellulose fibers become too short to be reused. Most clear plastic bottles can’t be turned into new bottles. Yet recycling does save energy. Making soda cans from recycled aluminum requires 95 percent less energy than mining and using raw ore.
The upheaval that followed China’s decision has prompted calls for bans and fees to discourage plastic use; localities started to pass on their higher recycling costs to homeowners and businesses…
Here in rural Pagosa Springs, recycling was always a challenge. We have depended largely upon ordinary citizens to sort their recyclables properly — or upon local waste haulers to do the sorting. Realistically, that makes it impossible to meet the new Chinese standards of 0.5 percent contamination.
But for a rural community, that’s only part of the problem. Archuleta County has been hauling its recyclables to distant processing facilities. As the value of recycled packaging falls lower and lower — and as large processing facilities find themselves stockpiling millions of tons of (currently worthless) materials, in hopes that the market will turn around — our little rural community is finding itself without anyone willing to accept our meager supply.
What to do? Well, I guess it all goes into the landfill, unless something changes soon.
Another solution: Buy less stuff in the first place, and look for products that last. And for everyone’s sake — for the sake of the whole planet, in fact — stop buying water in plastic bottles…
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.